"..I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." Ez36v26
Ruins happen, in the blink of an eye, living architectures are toppled, decimated and undone through negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault. Very deliberate retention makes purposive otherwise incidental ruination and it is this question which drives the exhibition. And throughout it treads a fine line between insightful observation and cynical legitimation. Much hangs on your reading of 'lust'.
Ruins are poetic precisely in their purposelessness: obliquely suggestive, unfinished, pregnant; there is an allure to a fragment. However, if that fragment is fetishised, objectified as Heidegger's hammer, it is twice broken.
Lust is a deadly sin because it is a pathological comportment, it exerts power to fragment so to privilege the image of a thing. The image becomes a stasis, and stasis leads to death. As the luster abstracts a woman to a mere sum of parts, a means to an end, useful and consumable, so we with Ruin Lust. Our chronological snobbery entertains some built memento mori, a cautionary tale, a nostalgic crutch, only to find ourselves ruined in this entropic wallowing, trapped inside the construction of a body dichotomised from its soul.
This show is a pornographic catalogue, an orgy of denuded chapels, bunkers and the Ferrier Estate. The game is not merely visual association, Laura Oldfield Ford powerfully paints the relationship between ruins and modernism's insidious abstraction, and viscerally feels the shame of it.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ruin-lust
No comments:
Post a Comment